The Buddies are celebrating their hometown New York Knicks, who won the 2025 NBA Cup on Tuesday night!
The Budster and I are in a celebratory mood after the New York Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs to win the 2025 NBA Cup Championship!
The NBA Cup is a mid-season tournament, now in its second year, that serves as an early indicator of league balance, team resilience and talent, and a championship in its own right.
It’s not an NBA championship, and to be clear the team has a long road ahead with some extremely dangerous teams — including the 24-2 Oklahoma City Thunder — to contend with en route to the goal of a ring, but every contender had its eye on the NBA Cup trophy, and the Knicks came out on top. That bodes well for them.
The Knicks sit at 18-7 in the standings (19-7 total) with the best points margin in the NBA’s Eastern Conference, and are currently third in betting markets to win it all in the postseason. Not bad for a bunch of guys casually dismissed as non-factors just a year ago.
For now, it’s time to enjoy the win and hope the momentum carries forward for a team that has made basketball exciting in New York again.
Amazon has not been helpful when its drivers have stolen pets from customers, treating the incidents as customer service issues.
A woman in California is in a panic after her cat went missing and her home security cameras showed an Amazon driver carrying the kitty away.
Diane Huff-Medina’s footage shows a driver bending down to pet her cat, Piper, during a delivery this weekend. After delivering the package, the Ring camera footage shows, the driver grabbed Piper on the way out, put her in his vehicle and drove off.
“I thought he was just petting her for a second, but yeah … I had to rewatch it a couple of times because it is hard to see, it’s dark, and he doesn’t carry her very nicely,” Huff-Medina told LA’s KABC. “I see her little tail and I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
Piper the cat. Credit: Diane Huff-Medina
Unfortunately incidents like this seem to happen regularly, and Amazon continues to fall woefully short when it comes to handling them and helping reunited their customers with their pets.
In an incident from last year when one of the company’s drivers stole Feefee, a cat belonging to the Ishak family of Everett, Washington, Amazon’s customer service representatives told the family the company could not force the woman to return the cat, and refused to give the woman’s address or even her general neighborhood to the family so they could search for Feefee.
In a similar incident from August, an Amazon driver stole Murphy, a cat belonging to Kathy Souza from Massachusetts. While Souza thankfully was reunited with Murphy, Amazon was not helpful, she said.
“I spoke with someone at Amazon who asked, ‘Is the cat worth more or less than $200?’” Souza wrote incredulously on Facebook while Murphy was still missing.
Credit: Diane Huff-Medina
This time, an Amazon rep told Huff-Medina they’d identified the driver, but couldn’t get in touch with him.
It’s amazing that after all these incidents, Amazon still treats the theft of cats and dogs by their delivery drivers as a customer service issue, and seems to have no standard protocol for working with law enforcement to get the animals returned.
Indeed, there’s one common thread to all the stories that end happily — in those cases the victims did everything they could to find their pets and did not wait for Amazon or local police to take the thefts seriously.
In the Ishak family’s case, they spent several days posting flyers, talking to local media and driving around in a widening circle to look for the car they’d seen on their doorbell camera. That’s ultimately how they found Feefee: instead of surrendering the scared feline as she told Amazon she would, the driver simply dumped Feefee outside her own building. The Ishaks found Feefee scared and hungry, hiding in the bushes outside the driver’s apartment complex, but otherwise unharmed.
In Souza’s case, her relentless efforts to make noise and draw attention to the driver and Amazon ultimately prompted the driver to return Murphy.
So we’re hoping Huff-Medina takes a similar route, because unfortunately these cases are not a priority for the corporate behemoth, nor for local police, as most state laws consider pets property, and stealing a pet is considered a small time crime. Let’s hope there’s good news soon.
A writer reminds us that feline friendships don’t always come easy, but some of the hardest-won are the most rewarding.
When San Francisco’s KQED, the local public radio affiliate, asked its culture writers to reflect on “one beautiful thing” from 2025, Rae Alexander chose her cat, Kevin.
Kevin is “chaos in cat form,” a feline “sociopath” who doesn’t realize how much damage he does with his claws. The tabby, Alexander writes, is “never not screaming at us for food” and pads around as if he owns the place. (That sounds awfully familiar!)
After bringing Kevin’s heavily pregnant mother in from the cold earlier this year, Alexander adopted Kevin’s mother and his “well-behaved sister,” but was repeatedly rebuffed when she tried to get rid of Kevin himself.
Three potential adopters fell through while Kevin was growing out of his kitten stage, drastically reducing his chances of finding a home.
Then something crazy happened: cat and human came to a mutual understanding and the beginnings of trust led to friendship and love. As with any progress in gaining a cat’s trust, it was not a quick process, but Kevin eventually showed another side — a much softer, appreciative version of himself who enjoys cuddling and expresses love despite his quirks.
“As this fraught year draws to a close, I want Kevin to be a pertinent reminder to us all that the little things bumming us out today might just lead to the things that make us happiest tomorrow,” Alexander wrote. “Start putting all those everyday stresses on the stairs. You never know where that might lead in 2026.”
Apologies for going radio silent over the past week. This past Saturday I sat down to write and my computer was dead. As in completely dead — I couldn’t even trick it into loading BIOS or getting a boot screen.
So I said farewell to a machine that had served me well since 2018, that served as my primary platform for writing, producing music and gaming.
Now I’ve got an absolute beast of a machine centered on one of the new Ryzen chipsets, and it takes quite a bit of restraint not to go into nerdy details. I’m still setting things up, especially the music production workflow.
The important thing is, I’m able to properly sit at a desk and write again, and Buddy can properly supervise me from his desktop perch again, so we are now back!
Buddy the Cat’s talents are innumerable! In this rousing number he slips into the style of Gilbert and Sullivan and uses verse to tell us what a feline should be.
“I am the very model of a feline so crepuscular My visage is so handsome and my meowscles are so muscular! I am a little tiger though the fact may seem improbable My knowledge is near boundless in all matters gastronomical I eat six meals a day in circumstances nominal For serving snacks when I demand, my human is responsible No challenge is impossible, no problem yet insoluble I am the very model of a feline so phenomenal!
I’m schooled in all biology from macro to subcellular A meowster of olfactory for every object smellular My hearing’s extrasensitive in low and higher frequencies I hear the mice a-chatter but the elephants don’t speak to me My style is more Big Punisher than Doctor Dre or Easy E Cuz when it comes to hip hop my tastes all face to easterly I like to shake my booty, I’m funky when I need to be I am the very model of a cat who does it easily!
I rule with iron paws be it jungle or the living room And when I’m finished dining, I am content to sit and groom When it comes to games I am the ultimate competitor Obligatory carnivore, I am a model predator Yet somehow cute and fluffy when I feel the need to be Mostly when I tell my buddy “Wake up, human, and feed me!
I am well-versed in big cats whether tiger or jaguarian And qualities of catnip like a feline rastafarian Intimidating surely, in my home I am the guardian Look dashing in a tux or the kit of a safarian! When it comes to ladies all the gents seek my analysis I designed the Taj Mahal and Cleopatra’s palaces I drink champagne from bottles and sip water from my chalices Then ignite sky with a range of borealises! A champion of Opens like the French, Aussie and Wimbledon My game is too complex for the tastes of canine simpletons
A predator so optimal, impeded by no obstacle When I’m roused to anger you will find me quite unstoppable Stylish with a monacle, calm and rarely volatile I am the very model of a feline so phenomenal!
I am the very model of a feline so phenomenal!
[Chorus of girls]
He is the very model of a feline so phenomenal! Find a better cat? Well that is just impossible! He is the very model of a feline so phenomenal!”
They appear out of nowhere on a scenic route in New York’s Catskill mountains, beckoning drivers to stop and check out the rest of the wonders inside the nearby shop.
A few years ago on the way back from the Catskills, a scenic mountain belt in low-central New York, I spotted this beauty from the road and had to stop:
It’s a heavily modified, custom Dodge Magnum crafted by artist Steve Heller. The parcel of land I’d almost passed houses his shop, Fabulous Furniture On 28, one of the most unique spots you can find in the state, if not the country.
Here are a few other photos of the Cro Magnum I took that day:
Heller’s property is adorned with all sorts of retrofuturistic metallic sculptures that evoke the science fiction films and comic books of yesteryear:
The classic cars are my favorite, but unfortunately I did not get to see them all that day.
The header image and the images below are from Heller’s site, while I took the other photos on the day I stopped to look around.
The header image is another Dodge Magnum, while the beast below is The Marquis de Soto, a customized Mercury Grand Marquis:
Pain In The Bud 